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The Inner Chief Podcast

An iTunes #1 Career and Top #5 Business Podcast

The Inner Chief is for leaders, professionals and small business owners who want to accelerate their career and growth. Our guest chiefs and gurus share powerful stories and strategies so you can have for more purpose, influence and impact in your career.

In this episode we talk with CEO, SalesITV and Sales ROI Dean Mannix on overcoming your limitations to live a bigger life and selling like the best in the world

ABOUT DEAN MANNIX

Dean is the author of Australia’s largest library of video sales and service training and has delivered sales performance projects in over 25 countries. He is recognised as one of Australia’s leading sales performance coaches with 30 years of legal, finance, sales and management experience. He advises, coaches and trains senior executives from many of the world’s leading corporations.

He has also been the CEO of a leading property development and childcare management company which he built to a team of 140 employees. He then developed and led a highly successful sales team in the technology space and simultaneously grew his consulting business.

WHAT WE COVER

– How he coped with the murder of his father at 15
– How he built a multi-million dollar childcare business and then lost it all by 26
– How he has become the trusted sales coach of the world's biggest companies
– Resilience and living a better life
– The most important steps to sell like the best in the world

CONNECTING WITH DEAN MANNIX

KEY POINTS FROM DEAN MANNIX

So I got home four days later, to find out that my father had been having an affair, on the front page of the newspaper. Now there wasn't social media in those days, but that was a close as you get to something really terrible being put on Facebook and shown to the world. Four days later after that, my brother got framed for his murder, and four and a half months after that, my brother got let out of jail, because they found the guys that did it. So, my family were all going through what they had to go through, but what was amazing was the way that my friends rallied around me, and in particular, the fathers of my friends. It's amazing, I was thinking about memories that have really shaped me, because I'm looking at writing another book now, and one of the strongest memories I have of that time in my life, is being at the funeral and seeing my tennis coach at the funeral. He was a real role model for me and seeing him there made a massive difference

I think it's easy to underestimate how, just little things can make a big difference when people are going through challenges, and you don't have to become someone's psychologist to help them through a tough moment. You just have to be in that space, and help them refocus and do things that are outside of, I guess, moping, worrying and being concerned.

Just take the initiative. Don't wait for your boss to define what the next step is. Have the courage and the guts to take your own initiative

Being fantastic getting things done, does not mean you're fantastic at getting others to get things done

The other big one, especially for people starting out companies, get your accounting right. You cannot underestimate how important it is to have your numbers and your accounting right, right from the start, because if you don't have real-time reporting, if you don't understand what those numbers mean, if you don't have a good numbers person to talk to, you make insane mistakes.

I think you've got to remind yourself every single day, what your bedrock is. So where does your expertise come from, because that's where your authority ultimate comes from, if you're a young leader or a young manager.

You've got to remind yourself, you are the leader and leaders need to collaborate, leaders need to consult, but leaders need to make decisions.

you need to go on a personal values journey. You need to figure out what rally makes you tick. So health, growth and happiness have been my three primary values for the last 24 years

And this is one of the reasons I love physical challenges, is because when you conquer a physical challenge, there's a physical manifestation of the fact that the limits you're placing on yourself, are not real and that ideally flows through into the emotional limits you're placing on yourself, the relationship limits you're placing on yourself, the financial limits and so on.

You know its something I've been meditating on a lot is, how hard people will fight for their limitations, and how little they'll fight for their growth. So you tell somebody you should be earning twice as much, they will argue with you, they will debate it with you, they will fight you on that. You tell somebody that their relationship should be better ten years later, they'll say ‘No it goes stale. No things are tougher now we've got kids'. People fight so hard for their limitations, and much harder than they do for growth and everything else they should be chasing. It's something I've been meditating on a lot.

You've got to keep re-defining what the next level is. Good to Great was to me, one of the best book titles ever, because it is so true. I was listening to Tony Robbins speak the other day, and he was saying that basically, he got from $30000 to a million dollars in one year, but then he earned a million dollars for the next six

And it comes back to letting go. You've got to be brave enough to let go of the things that made you successful this time around, so that you can grab on to the things that will make you successful the next level

I think the first thing people get wrong is ignoring who they're sending a message to. The bottom line is the receiver, is more important that the transmitter, because if the transmitter doesn't connect with the receiver, it's irrelevant what you transmit. So you've got to pay more attention to the audience you're speaking to, and what's going on inside their heads, and what matters to them

The first major drop-off rate is, people don't engage their audience, as in their prospect with a credible reason. So they engage them based on ‘I need to sell you something' versus, this is going to make you want to make inquiry and make you interested. So they don't do the work

When people tell me they've got a 50% conversion rate, I tell them that they're lying to me, because they're ignoring all the people that didn't enter their funnel that should have, as a result of a breakdown in that area.

If you're in an environment that is inconsistent with your values, you will behave in a way that is inconsistent with your values, and unfortunately, when you're in an environment which has 10000 people in it, all doing the same thing, you start to question your values, rather than the organisations values.

The big thing about sales is, you don't have to improve the entire system to have success. You need a good end to end process, but in terms of sales growth, if you improve any of those seven accelerants, you'll get immediate sales growth

Your organization's budget is the lowest amount that they will accept, to have the average group of sales people on the payroll. So, if you're setting your goals and your aspirations around those provided to you by your corporation, you are way below where you need to be, unless you desire a life of mediocrity.

Be flexible. Just be flexible and don't attach your identity to your job/employer, because it's going to have to change so may times, that if your identity is attached to that, you'll be in turmoil for the rest of your life. You've got to define your identity, and then work your career and the way that you earn money, in an around that.

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ABOUT GREG LAYTON

Greg is the Founder of Chief Maker and an Executive Coach who specialises in accelerating the careers of senior managers into C-suite roles. He is the author of Chief Maker –
How to Rise Above the Pack and Get a Seat on the Executive Team and the host of The Inner Chief podcast.